CJ Smacks ...Everyone over Assessment Reform

This from C-J:

...Here are some facts:

It does not take a good teacher excessive time to prepare for CATS tests, as critics like to claim.

It would be wrong to drastically narrow the testing, since that inevitably would narrow the teaching that precedes it.

It would be astonishingly stupid to remove writing portfolios from the accountability system, because that certainly would end serious classroom work on this profoundly important capstone skill, which is essential not just for admission to college these days but also to success in the information age workforce.

It would be equally absurd to remove open-response test questions, since they get at the very deep learning and critical thinking that education reform was supposed to foster.

It's deceitful to condemn the legitimate coaching of student writers as "suspect" and to mistake the product of student rewrites as "inauthentic."

It would be educational malfesance to replace CATS with a jury-rigged combination of some off-the-shelf nationally normed test and a few extra questions that make passing efforts to address Kentucky curriculum -- especially since those nationally normed tests are designed to categorize a substantial percentage of those who take them as failures.

Throwing open the entire state curriculum to a revision of standards would, in the current environment, certainly produce a dumbing down of what Kentucky expects its kids to learn...

... there are deep, important differences separating what educators, politicians and competing advocates believe should be done.

To run a political bulldozer over CATS in the few days remaining to this General Assembly session would be a travesty.

Incredibly, almost nobody is standing up to object. All the interested parties cower at the roadside, frightened of retribution from Mr. Williams, Mr. Kelly and the regressive caucus that keeps them in control of events at the Capitol.

Conservative enemies of public education sit in the cramped turrets of their think tanks and cheer.

Perhaps the most pathetic claim is Mr. Moberly's -- that his House bill will successfully set and enforce "world-class benchmarks" and "preserve the principles of reform," serving not only to place Kentucky students' achievement in a national context but also to supply prescriptive information for individual students and to test the acquisition of state-established curriculum. ...No testing system can claim to do all three...

Perhaps the greatest disappointment is a lack of leadership from Gov. Steve Beshear, who has contented himself with a muted call for a thorough review ... whining, "The Republicans won't let me do anything." ...